Updated Residents of the United States woke this morning to find widespread outages in cellular service, with AT&T bearing the brunt of a seemingly nationwide issue.
T-Mobile US and Verizon, the other two major cell network operators in America, have also seen widespread outage reports, though far fewer in number than AT&T.
With most of the reports pertaining to AT&T, and T-Mo and Verizon's denials of anything wrong on their end, the outage appears to be an AT&T issue, which the carrier has confirmed.
A map of AT&T outage reports shows several major metropolitan areas are affected at the time of publication, including Atlanta, Dallas and Houston.
Many of those towers were purchased from AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, making even the largest US cellular providers look more like the small virtual network operators their hardware has classically supported.
Cloudflare has a graph showing a significant drop off of IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity for AT&T, leading some network administrators to speculate it's a BGP issue.
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I did hear that it was caused by a solar flare, but I haven't actually checked that. If it wasn't a solar flare, I wonder if it could've been a case of cyber warfare?
Unlikely. The most likely cause is that it was caused by a misconfiguration, like someone typo'd a line in a file somewhere, which then propagated outwards when everything downstream got the faulty update.
If it was a solar flare,or cyberwarfare, it would be more indiscriminate, rather than targeting a specific vendor's hardware or a single network.